by Stephen Hunt
‘Jared, those are supplies we need,’ said Molly. ‘Compasses, pistols, tinned food, blue skin paint so that we can pass for native Kals.’
‘No, lass,’ said the commodore, unstoppering the bottle. ‘This is what we need. A toast to Duncan and his skill, swooping here and there like a blessed hunting hawk. I’ve had my fill of being treated like a wave-tossed cork by fate. Fired out of uncommonly sized cannons, living in the belly of steammen vessels crossing the celestial darks, cast away like a plummeting stone over the enemy’s stronghold.’ He took a swig from the bottle and offered it to Keyspierre but the shiftie scientist looked disgusted. ‘No? Suit yourself. Ah, it’s good. This’ll put hairs on your chest. No, it’s the solid land for me from now on. My boots firmly on the ground, even if the land is that of wicked Kaliban.’
Rooksby yelped as they started to roll again, Duncan grunting and pulling the craft back on course. His face was beaded with sweat and his lips pulled so tight he was drawing blood with the force of his concentration.
‘Your piloting is magnificent,’ announced the young Starsprite. ‘It is like having an organ for atmospheric flight inside me. I can feel what you are doing. How you’re using the side sails to brake and turn us. But we’re going to pass through a wall of turbulence at the borders of the troposphere, I can feel it flowing ahead of us.’
Molly had to stop herself from yelling as the battering outside renewed itself with fresh vigour. As if sensing the fear inside her passengers, Starsprite formed a series of pews topped with railings to hold onto across her deck. Molly clutched at one until her knuckles stood out on the back of her hands like white stones on a Spumehead beach. Then they were slipping towards smoother currents, the shaking abating.
‘Can you not increase the size of the main sail triangle?’ called Duncan from his position in the nose.
‘I do not have enough material,’ replied the craft. ‘I know the proportions of the sail are wrong but my hull is already as thin as I dare squeeze it.’
‘We’re gliding too heavy for a brake and tug landing,’ said Duncan, banking the craft. ‘I’m going to try and spiral us down, long wide figures of eight all the way to the ground. Keep your eyes open for a straight stretch of sand for our final glide in.’
Molly moved to the front and stared out of the elongated porthole. She could see the face of Kaliban, the carving no bigger than her thumbnail. Lord Starhome had been as good as his – her? – word, after all; dropping the expedition down on top of the monumental carving like a sycamore seed sinking to the ground. Shadows of canyons and mountains crisscrossed the land below – if summits were visible at this height, they must be on a scale that dwarfed the craggy ranges of the Jackelian uplands. Molly closed her eyes and waited for the jumbled headache of Kyorin’s memories to cast adrift a suitable landing zone. There. To the south of the carving, long undulating dunes of dust-thin sand. She could see them in her mind’s eye, blowing and shifting in front of a sierra eroded by the fierce sands into a forest of toadstool-like capstones.
Molly pointed out the stretch to Duncan. ‘Place the tail of your last loop in the shadows of the carving’s chin, there’s sand enough to skim down for a long, low landing.’
Duncan grunted in affirmation, not taking his concentration away from the porthole for a second. ‘Aye, I see it, I see it.’
Molly’s head was throbbing now. It was painful, accessing the jumble of memories that Kyorin had dumped into her. Increasingly so, each time she tried it. What, she wondered, did the pain mean?
Someone was behind her. Jeanne and her father. The young shiftie seemed fascinated by the crimson vista circling in front of the transparent material of the porthole. ‘Those lines out there. They are the same canals the steamman presented at the Royal Society.’
Who had told her? Coppertracks was humble about his achievements and Lord Rooksby had no reason to talk about his rival’s findings.
Molly nodded, warily.
‘A remarkable achievement,’ said Keyspierre, his mood improving now they had hope of a landing. ‘The Kals surely must have organized themselves as a commonshare and laboured mightily to achieve such a network.’
When it came, the final meeting with the ground was blis-teringly fast. The craft tore through the barrage of rolling dunes with whip-cracking explosions of red sand as each impact slowed Starsprite a little more. Then there was a long tearing sound as her belly caught the sand, sliding for what seemed hours before they stopped. Molly was shaking as she got to her feet. She hadn’t realized how terrified she had been during the long fall towards Kaliban and now the shock of their arrival was catching up with her. For a moment she wondered if the impact had affected her eyes – everything seemed to be turning red. But it was Starsprite. Their craft was changing the colour of her hull, the texture becoming grainy red rather than silvery smooth – camouflaging her lines – blending in with the sand in which she had settled.
‘Open the door,’ said Molly. ‘Let’s see where we are.’
‘I haven’t ordered that,’ Rooksby practically shrieked, his nerves in shreds.
Molly pointedly ignored him and jumped out of the hole rippling open in young Starsprite’s stern, landing ankle deep in the ruby sands. She felt light on her feet, springy. The pull of this world was only two thirds what she was used to back home. Then the intense wall of heat struck her. It was like walking into an oven, thick, cloying. Circle’s teeth! Molly noticed how near they had come to a canyon drop starting only ten feet away from the Starsprite’s nose. No hint of this in Kyorin’s memory of the landscape. Ten feet from a plunge to – she looked over the edge – the walls narrowed down to an impossibly deep death, as if Kaliban was an apple and someone had run a knife around its circumference in an attempt to cut it open. The floor of the ravine was filled with a stream of dark thrashing flesh. No accident of geography, then – she was looking at more of the Army of Shadows’ slave machines. Mining worms.
Molly turned away from the foul sight, allowing herself a brief snatch of exhilaration. They had actually done it. All the times Molly Templar had written of explorers landing by airship on one of the moons, finding bizarre alien lands, and now she was actually following in her literary creations’ footsteps. Molly looked around, drinking in the strange sights. No greens, no blues, everything tinted by the colour of blood, a wasteland of endless deserts. Her euphoria dwindled. How she wished one of her novels’ clever, fast-thinking heroes or heroines were here instead of her. Jack Riot or Emma Cochrane. Either of them would have been able to make a much better bid of their desperate last attempt to save the Jackelian people than her.
There was a thump behind Molly as Coppertracks and the commodore exited the craft. The steamman slipthinker’s two wide caterpillar tracks made for an effortless passage across the fine sands.
Commodore Black peered over the edge of the ravine and shook his head in repugnance. ‘Look on the canyon floor down there. Those are the black slug machines of the Army of Shadows, the same wicked things I saw infesting Quatérshift. Thousands of the foul creatures wriggling around down below like a river of terrible worms.’
‘There’s nothing left,’ said Molly, sadly. ‘They must be cutting new ravines like this all across the world, but they’ve sucked the place dry. No more minerals, no more gases and oils, no more deep-water aquifers. Kaliban really is dying.’
‘We see before us how our world will look in a couple of thousand years,’ said Coppertracks, ‘if we fail to turn back the Army of Shadows.’
‘Then we won’t fail, Aliquot,’ said the commodore. ‘For even a Cassarabian tribesman would turn their nose up at this wicked empty heat-blasted land. It’s certainly no place for any honest Jackelian.’
Duncan Connor swung out of the craft followed by the two shifties and Lord Rooksby, the latter strangely reluctant to examine the landscape for all of his protestations of the right to command their expedition.
‘How does this compare to the deserts of Cassarabia?’ Molly a
sked Duncan.
‘The scale of things was a wee bit more humble in the caliphate,’ noted the uplander. He was standing with his back to the canyon and staring towards the carving. The great face of Kaliban rose out of the dunes, as high as a mountain that had been levelled straight by the hand of gods.
Interesting, thought Molly. You could only see the features of the face from above, but the angular rise of a thousand flat terraces, some as tall as Middlesteel’s pneumatic towers, demonstrated that the carving was no freak of geology.
‘An idol, sir, of the natives’ gods,’ said Lord Rooksby, dismissively.
Molly shook her head. ‘Those terraces used to be hanging gardens, I think, and this desert a great forest. There hasn’t been water to run through its sluices and waterfalls for many hundreds of years.’
So strange. Seeing all this for the first time, but not for the first time. Everything carried with it the strangest sense of déjà vu and it wasn’t even hers.
‘Pah, it shows very little sophistication,’ said Lord Rooksby. ‘Compared to the noble proportions of Jackelian architecture such a barbarous carbuncle only demonstrates the superiority of the race of man.’
‘I disagree with your conclusions,’ said Keyspierre. The Quatérshiftian handed his daughter a folding telescope that he had secured from the supply crates. ‘It was clearly a high civilization, and that we stand here in the ruins of their world certainly does not bode well for our mission to uncover our invaders’ supposed weaknesses.’
‘The people must persevere,’ said Jeanne, clasping her fist to her chest. No doubt one of the many sayings parroted by the children of the revolution.
‘There is no other course,’ agreed Keyspierre.
Molly indicated the carving’s lee side, to the west. ‘That’s where the last great city of Kaliban lies. Half a day’s walk from here.’
‘Does it have a name?’ asked Duncan.
Molly’s head was throbbing more than ever with the weight of memories. ‘Iskalajinn. Not that the locals speak it with their lips, only up here.’ She tapped the side of her head. ‘It is the Kal word for the end of all dreams.’
‘Ah, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘I have no trouble speaking my mind, but I’ve never talked with my mind before. I’ll happily paint my face blue, but the first time I talk with my thirsty lips I’ll give the game away.’
‘Blue face or no, you’d only ever pass for a Kal in the dark of night,’ said Molly. ‘You’re far too tall and broad. You too, Duncan. There are no Kals with muscles like yours. You’ll have to keep watch on the city from outside.’
‘And I presume I would be correct in thinking there are no steammen on Kaliban, Molly softbody?’ asked Coppertracks.
Molly shook her head, sadly. ‘I don’t think the Army of Shadows’ masters trust the life metal. They prefer their slaves organic and pliable. You should stay here with the ship.’
Duncan shook his head. ‘I’m the only one who knows how to survive in a desert, lassie, and there’s a good reason why Cassarabians travel in caravans across the sands. It’s how you stay alive. We go together. Me, the old steamer and the commodore will hole up outside the city. Close enough to come and get you if you’re discovered.’
And that left the three people she least wanted to infiltrate the last stronghold of the Army of Shadows on Kaliban with. Rooksby and the two shifties, none of whom showed any inclination to trust the instincts she had inherited from Kyorin. She barely trusted them herself, thanks to the unforeseen canyon they had nearly tumbled into. But right now, the runaway slave’s decaying ghost was all they had to keep the expedition alive in the heart of the enemy’s fastness.
* * *
Of all of the expedition members, Molly quickly realized that Duncan Connor demonstrated the most proficiency at moving through the fine soft sands in the white robes that Molly had dredged from Kyorin’s memories and had made up in Middlesteel. There seemed to be a knack to travelling across the sands in a steady way without letting your boots be sucked down – without making each step a struggle to withdraw the sole. But then, Connor of Cassarabia had surely gained enough practice during the years when he had earnt that moniker. He had told them the Cassarabian name for the fine, sapping dunes they were wading over; melah. One of at least fifty names the warring, fractious tribes he had held the southern frontier against possessed for sand. And Duncan’s knowledge stretched to more practical purposes, too. Tying up the belts and laces of the undulating white robes was second nature to him, leaving mere strips of blue-dyed skin visible under their headscarves.
Only Coppertracks moved without the protection of the Kal sand-traveller’s garb. But then there was no disguising his iron body, and his two wide caterpillar tracks seemed far better suited to skimming across the sands than the long legs of the race of man. Each hour of travelling brought the colossal carving closer, rising higher and higher above them until the sun rotating through the purple sky dropped the face’s shadow across them. The last inhabited city of Kaliban had been positioned so that its streets would be sheltered in the carving’s shade at the full height of the midday sun. Now they were given the same protection from the rays of the furnace heat.
‘Perhaps I should have stayed with the ship,’ said Coppertracks. ‘My hull is too burnished. I glint in the daylight for any scout of the Army of Shadows to see.’
And Starsprite’s pleas had been so intense and plaintive, begging for company – so soon after her abandonment by her mother. But the young craft was as hidden as she could be and a great deal safer than any of the rest of them. They would be back, if they survived. Unless they convinced the Army of Shadows to build another cannon for them, the looking-glass gate stored inside Starsprite’s hull was their sole way home.
As the expedition members moved towards the last city of the Kals, from time to time they would stumble over something partially hidden by the sands. An ancient reminder that Kaliban had been a very different place before its occupation by the Army of Shadows. It was in such a find that Molly left Coppertracks, Duncan and the commodore: a cracked-open dome, empty and half swamped by sand. But it would serve as shelter from the dust devils that whipped across the surface of the land, as well as the hunts of the slat patrols.
‘Molly,’ called Commodore Black. ‘How long are we to leave you before we come looking for you?’
‘We’ll be back in two or three days at most,’ said Molly. ‘Stay here and mount a sentry. The slats prefer to patrol at night and Kyorin has memories of other things in the desert, experiments of the Army of Shadows’ womb mages that have been released to exterminate the free Kal.’
Both Rooksby and the two shifties bridled at leaving behind their pistols from the supply crates, but Molly insisted. Kals did not own such things, nor would they have used them if they did. Nothing would give them away more quickly than if they were found carrying weapons.
The remaining four members of the expedition approached Iskalajinn at twilight, the sun setting behind the carving, revealing a glass-slag sprawl nestling against the rise of the face of Kaliban, low buildings spilling across the sea of dunes and then rising high on terraces set against the carving. The light of the furnace sky was slowly replaced by a green shimmer from the emerald geodesic domes of the Army of Shadows that rose on the far side of their slave city of tenements, thousands of hexagonal panels shining like insect eyes ripped from the skull of a mantis. Molly had a sense that the Kals were almost never allowed inside the comfort of the domes – and if they were, they were even more rarely ever seen again. But the thoughts bubbling out of Kyorin’s memories suggested that he believed that there were gardens inside, running waters and a climate far more agreeable than the dire oven that their slaves laboured in. The Kals’ whitewashed habitations were built of a quartz-like material, extracted by chemically processing the sand and moulded in blocks of narrow streets to protect against the sun, each dwelling topped by a long curved wind tower designed to funnel the slightest of winds down to t
he rooms inside and cool them.
‘This is the great bastion of the Army of Shadows?’ said Rooksby, his voice disbelieving, looking at the glitter of the overlapping domes. ‘The slums of Whineside seen from the top of Tavistead Hill are a more imposing sight.’
‘Oh, there were many more of them, once,’ said Molly. ‘But as the land’s bounty has been exhausted, the Army of Shadows’ numbers have been controlled down to what you see here.’
‘There are enough of their spawn in Quatérshift,’ said Jeanne, ‘and they seemed plentiful enough to me as they overran our territory.’
Keyspierre glared at his daughter. ‘You are coming close to voicing defeatist sentiments, compatriot daughter.’
‘I saw the gnawed bones of our people outside Courau, compatriot father,’ said Jeanne.
Keyspierre’s face went red at the tone of insolence in her voice and for a moment Molly thought that he was going to strike her, but he obviously thought better of disciplining his daughter in front of them. ‘Try remembering that when you see the faces of the monsters responsible for their deaths.’
‘These Kals, sir, are cowards,’ said Rooksby. ‘With so few of the enemy’s number left here, why have the natives not risen in revolt? If only we had the marines along that were meant to be here. Just a handful of them and we could have seized this pathetic hovel. Damn these Kals’ eyes.’
‘You’ll be able to measure their bravery soon enough,’ said Molly. ‘If we can meet up with Kyorin’s comrades.’
There was a location that burnt particularly bright in the jumbled buzz of memories that was Kyorin’s legacy to her. Outside the walled city, a place where the slat soldiers rarely came. She found it easily by the presence of the seventy-foot high cacti, their leaf sails – vast moisture traps – slowly rotating. Taps had been drilled into them, but the queues of Kals had thinned out now that the previous day’s collected water had slowed to a mere trickle through the plants’ veins.